General Reference Works

The steady decline in the number of reference works in American literature published in recent years has accelerated in 2019. Neither a Dictionary of Literary Biography volume relevant to this chapter nor a new supplement to Scribner's American Writers series was issued. To be sure, a number of handbooks, companions, and genre histories of bildungsromans, travelogues, "summer books," and crime and science fiction novels appeared, but many of them are pricey volumes published by Cambridge University Press and targeted for sale to libraries.

i African American Literature

As is often the case, the best reference tools published in 2019 are devoted to African American literature, culture, and the arts. The single most valuable volume, in my opinion, is Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement, ed. Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis (Rowman & Littlefield). Focused and thorough if not exhaustive, the encyclopedia contains 94 entries by nearly 30 contributors and introduces "key contributors to the Black Arts Movement," including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and Lorenzo Thomas; the "major works produced during the period," roughly the late 1950s to the late 1970s, such as Dutchman, Mumbo Jumbo, A Raisin in the Sun, Soul on Ice, and "Sonny's Blues"; "significant publications such as Black Theatre magazine"; and "influential groups and organizations, such as the Umbra Poetry Workshop, Deacons for Defense, Negro Ensemble theatre, and Broadside Press."

A close second for excellence is Lauri Ramey's A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge), which offers "a summative and illustrative overview of the genre from its origins to the present." It is a deceptively simple ambition, however: When does the genre begin? As Ramey explains, "African American literature survey courses typically open with 'the Harlem Renaissance,' skip over the middle decades of the twentieth century, move ahead to a period referred to as 'the Black Arts Movement,' and close with a view of 'today.'" The courses may notice Phillis Wheatley's neoclassical apostrophes in passing and spend a week reading Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect verse. But the critical investigation of an African American poetic tradition before the renaissance runs a risk, according to Ramey: "African American poetry has been judged by two sets of standards and it cannot gain respect from either"; for example, Wheatley's verse is imitative and thus inferior, and Dunbar wrote vulgar "jingles in a broken tongue." Ramey proposes nothing less than "an alternative canon of formal innovation and self-referencing" by Black poets originating in the estimated 6,000 slave songs or "sorrow songs," as W. E. B. Du Bois deemed them. ("Spirituals" is a misnomer.) Because it is "especially important to incorporate the oral tradition in the canon," Ramey's History calls for the recovery of as many of these source-texts as possible. After all, Dunbar for one "famously produced two styles of verse: standard diction and dialect poetry." In the end, to the question, "Is black poetry formal or dialect, folk or literary, oral or print, difficult or populist, accommodationist or protest?," the answer is yes.

By comparison, Yasser K. R. Aman's Modern African American Poets: From Hughes to Parker (Cambridge Scholars) seems old-school, flawed in conception, and narrow in scope, in effect a teacher's guide to the traditional survey of African American literature Ramey criticizes. In this eight-chapter history of African American poetry since the Harlem Renaissance, Aman situates a number of poets—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Roscoe C. Jamison, Ai, Nikky Finney, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, May Opitz, and Morgan Parker—along a continuum based on the false assumption that a poet's style can be "typed." The endpoints of this continuum are "experimental and radical" (i.e., Hughes) and "classicist" (i.e., Cullen) and never the twain shall meet. Hughes adapted jazz and the blues to dialect verse, and Cullen, "a classicist" who specialized in the traditional sonnet, "was not recognized as a universal poet since he could not escape the color prejudice," though he used the sonnet form in an effort "to distinguish himself as a universal poet" rather than "one concerned with racial problems." I wonder how Aman would have...